GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 1856-1950

George Bernard Shaw is considered the most significant British dramatist since Shake­speare. In addition to being a prolific play­wright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745) and the most readable music critic and best theatre critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quiet generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruth­less as a social critic and irrelevant to­ward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animat­ed by epigrams and lively dialogue.

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, of Irish Protestant parents on July 26, 1856. His father was improvident man, and Shaw’s early years were not happy ones. He attended school sporadically, and felt that he had learnt nothing. In 1876 he followed his mother to London, where she had gone with his two sisters to make a living giving sign­ing lessons. The next decade was one of frus­tration and near poverty. Shaw lived with and was supported by his mother. “I did not know myself into the struggle for life”, he said later. “I threw my mother into it”. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), a novel about prizefight­ing as an occupation that anticipates the theme of prostitution as an antisocial pro­fession in the play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), and An Unsocial Socialist (1883). Shaw spent his time reading, visit­ing museums, and writing unsuccessful novels. In 1881 he became a vegetarian, which he remained throughout his long life. “A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses”, he explained.

In 1884 he joined the recently formed Fabi­an Society*, which was later to be the nu­cleus of the British Labour Party, and he began to write and speak on political and economic topics and social reform.

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* Fabian Society — UK socialist organization for research, dis­cussion and publication, founded in London in 1884. Its name is derived from the Roman Commander Fabius Maximus

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Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns (many of them championing the con­troversial work of the German composer Ri­chard Wagner (1813-1883) from 1888 to 1890. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic, a post he held from 1888 to 1890 Shaw wrote lots of unforgettable articles.

In 1885 his friend William Archer* secured him a position as an art critic.

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* Archer, William (1856-1924) — Scottish drama critic. He did much to popularize Henrik (Johan) Ibsen (1828-1906), Nor­wegian dramatist and poet, whose realistic and often controversial plays revolutionized European theatre), in Eng­land and advocated a more serious and realistic drama.

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Shaw’s only credentials for the job, he said, was that he was the only Irishman who had ever entered the National gallery of Ireland, “except the officials”. Three years later he began writ­ing music criticism under the name Como di Bassetto and continued to do so until 1894. Though an amateur in this field also, his writings on music are among the most dis­tinguished in the 19th century.

Archer, an ardent supporter of the Norwe­gian dramatist Henrik Ibsen( 1826-1906), whose plays he translated, heightened Shaw’s interest in drama. In 1891, Shaw wrote his commentary on Ibsen’s plays The Quintes­sence of Ibsenism, in which he praises Ibsen for attaching middle class conventionality and hypocrisy. In 1892, he began his own career as a dramatist, first collaborating with Archer in Widower’s Houses, and in the years immediately following writing some of his most famous plays, including Mr Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man and Candida.

Shaw’s first play, Widow’s Houses, com­bined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flout­ing of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theatre. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage received brief runs at best or no productions at all. But in con­trast to much of the drama then current on the London stage, these plays dealt with contemporary social problems, problems considered unmentionable in genteel socie­ty and hardly suited to stage presentation. Shaw portrayed his situation frankly and honestly, intending to shock his audiences with a new view of society. He presented many of his characters as fools. He believed, however, in the power of human reason — what he called the “Life Force” — to cut through all pretence in the end. In their realism and wit, his plays were largely com­edies of ideas in the tradition of the French dramatist Moliere*, as Shaw himself claimed, and marked a turning to a realism and nat­uralism that was increasingly to dominate British drama.

One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversation), pub­lished in 1901, fared slightly better. The Devil’s Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sen­timental melodrama set in America during the Revolution, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw’s next work, Man and Su­perman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions; these are the substance of the nonrealistic, almost operatic, third act, “Don Juan in Hell,” often since produced independently.

Shaw’s plays were showed to find a wide audience, and disappointed in not having them produced often or at all, he began to publish them as plays to be read rather than performed. Almost all of his plays were pub­lished with long prefaces that dealt in depth with the issues of the play. Shaw continued this practice in later years, after his plays had achieved wide popularity in performance. Pygmalion is distinctive in having a long after-word or “sequel” in which Shaw dis­cusses the lives of his characters following the events of the play itself.

In 1898 Shaw married and from the turn of the century to his death in 1950 continued to write plays, engage in politics and social reform, and comment on a wide range of topics that included evolution, criminology, war, education, marriage, and religion. The preface to Androcles and the Lion is an ex­tensive commentary on the synoptic Gospels; the preface to Saint Joan, is an examination of the Medieval church and sainthood.

In the 20th century Shaw became one of the most popular British playwrights. In Major Barbara (1905), eventually made into a motion picture and The Doctor’s Dilem­ma (1906), Shaw continued, through high comedy, to probe society’s complicity in its own evils. In the first play, the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer are discovered to be religious in the high sense, in contrast to the public and private hypocrisies of the Salvation Army* and its benefactors.

In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw produced a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament.

With the discussion plays that followed — Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny’s First Play (1911) — Shaw moved into what might be discussed as se­rious farce; intellectual comedy with his usual verse for dialogue, but introducing nonrealistic elements that he later exploit­ed more fully. Although Fanny became his longest running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misal­liance. The mystical side of Shaw, mean­while, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of the medieval miracle play* and of the Victorian Christmas pantomime.

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* miracle (mystery) play — medieval religious drama based on stories from the Bible.

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Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1913... many years later popular also as a film and as a basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploi­tation of one human being by another.

Pygmalion was as ebullient in its outlook as Shaw’s next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intel­lectual watershed of World War I caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective ti­tle Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed.

For Saint Joan (1923), Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc* became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and in­spired genius.

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* Joan of Arc (1412-1431) — French military leader, Saint.

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Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crisis, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release theirpotential. These were themes he had han­dled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extrava­gance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes* than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St Lawrence on November 2, 1950.

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* Aristophanes (c.445-c.380 BC) — Greek comedy dramatist.

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To the end, Shaw continued to publish bril­liantly argued prefaces to his plays and to flood publishers with books, articles, and cantankerous letters to the editor. Among his other work, the novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide in Socialism and Capitalism (1928) remain useful compendia of his ideas. Thousands of his sparkling letters have also, been pub­lished, for example, those to English stage luminaries Ellen Terry (1847-1928) and Mrs Patric Campbell (1864-1940).

Although he founded no “school” of play­wrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of man­ners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, brought to bear on contempo­rary issues, helped mold the thought of his own and later generations.